All of these remarkable ways to hack CSS to make different geometric shapes (semi-circles, triangles, whatever) just leave me believing there is no computer science in CSS, no engineering in CSS, just a collection of hacks to develop to an underwhelming overcomplicated underpowered spec.
Add yet another level of unneeded complexity to web work.
CSS is very extremely well-specified in how it draws stuff, and if you use it within its bounds, it's very good at doing what it set out to accomplish. That is, as a way to style content. It was not designed as a "draw a triangle" language, and I'm sure the original people behind the CSS standard would never have thought of exploiting the bevel effect to draw a triangle.
I don't understand the attitude of "well, you're using CSS outside the bounds of what it was designed for, that means that CSS is ad-hoc garbage", nor the attitude of "well, you're exploiting CSS in a clever way, that means you're a terrible engineer".
It's a clever hack in the truest sense of the word, and that makes me proud.
Layout is a very different problem than styling. I think it's an absolute shame we're now just getting sophisticated layout management, but the styling has been around for a while, and it works fine.
The main issue with CSS is that you have to take old but not yet deprecated browsers into account. And even now, you have to take into account different devices, different sizes, different resolutions.
But I agree that's its not the usual language. Instead of writing words at the computer and have it compute it, you have to compute everything yourself in your head and output the script that do the display.
Add yet another level of unneeded complexity to web work.